Street solutions

Sunday

Feb 26, 2017 at 12:01 AM

Can we build ourselves out of homelessness? Affordable housing is important, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle because it’s affordable only to people with an income.

Can we inundate the homeless population with rehabilitation services (counselors, employment programs, addiction treatment, etc.)? Sure, these could provide valuable help for those who are ready to reintegrate into “normal” and “acceptable” society — but what about those who are not ready? The question then becomes, “How do people become ready to help themselves improve and heal themselves?”

What I’ve come to really understand about many people living unhoused is that they have few incentives in their lives on the streets to stay sober, look for work, seek housing or engage in other behaviors that could lead them out of homelessness. It isn’t that they lack the ability or the motivation. It’s that real opportunities seem so far out of reach that many decide to put their efforts toward adapting to the things that are within reach.

This is the basis of street culture, which is not lacking in ingenuity and resourcefulness. Street culture gets more prevalent as opportunities become further out of reach for people living below society’s bottom rung.

I am not judging street culture as either bad or good. I am pointing out that it’s a reality that continues to exist because it serves a purpose for some people. Others find it distasteful, obnoxious, and something that needs to go away by making more laws to prevent it.

Will further criminalization make the problem actually go away? Probably not. I suggest we seek to understand the phenomenon and develop clear avenues for people to work toward improving their life circumstances.

For example, the world of employment is a housed person’s game. To keep a full-time job while homeless is extremely challenging, because for the homeless, survival can be a full-time endeavor. It’s also true that making the transition from street culture to 9-to-5 culture is not something that just happens. I believe anything is possible, but the majority of the homeless struggle to handle such a transition.

The streets have a distinct social ecosystem, with its own rules and its own truths. It is difficult to comprehend if you come at it from a place of privilege.

Most who find themselves needing to adapt to it haven’t experienced the same privileges (a supportive family, educational opportunities, etc.) that some of us were raised with and take for granted. Solutions that come from privileged people aren’t always going to be effective in changing the lives of people who operate with a different understanding of the world.

So how do we, as problem-solvers, design solutions that have fully taken into account the experience of the streets before assuming we know what is best? Maybe there are insights at a street level that can help design pathways out of homelessness that our privileged minds haven’t been privy to.

We need to rethink how we address homelessness, and what stabilizing solutions are going to look like. Simultaneously, we need to have a clear vision for what kind of results we want to produce. Dozens of social service agencies are working with this population, with many different approaches. A single agency can’t solve this problem, but an organized collaboration among many will produce real results.

Here are some ideas that such a collaborative effort could pursue to help us stabilize the situation:

A day-center downtown could help — a place where people can access social services, pick up temporary work, have access to the Internet, get out of the weather, take care of hygiene needs, and exist without being a burden. It needs to be designed in a way that attracts people to it. In other words, it needs to be designed with input from people who would be using it.

Risky? Sort of, but so is making new laws that require resources to enforce them, and, in the long run, do too little to solve the problem.

More organized safe spot communities (rest stops) where people can find stability, adapt to holding responsibilities, experience positive community living, and be held accountable for behavioral problems.

Continue to diversify the affordable housing market to include very affordable housing (like Square One Villages) which would be available to people coming off the streets.

A micro-employment program that would give people living on the street the opportunity to make a small amount of money so they have alternatives to panhandling.

Most of us would agree that attempts at solutions over the past 10 years have not been as successful as we’d hoped. We need more voices at the table, not just the same choir singing the same songs.

More importantly, we need the community to believe that real change is possible — but we won’t get there by simply trying to make the “problem” disappear.

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